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Notice to Community: Password & Account Security

Hello Evony Community,

Just a reminder of the importance of having good password practices to ensure your account security is not jeapordized. Passwords should not be a common word or something quite easy for someone to guess. And remember that Evony staff will never under any circumstance request your password for your account so you should not give it out to anyone.

I thank Imperva and Eskenzi for allowing Evony to use their article below to highlight the importance of account/password security.

London, 21st January, 2010 -Imperva, the leader in Data Security, announced today the release of study analyzing 32 million passwords recently exposed in the Rockyou.com breach. Imperva's Application Defense Center (ADC) analyzed the strength of the passwords in a report, Consumer Password Worst Practices, that analyzes 32 million passwords to help consumers and website administrators identify the most commonly used passwords they should avoid when using social networking or e-commerce sites.

"Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today?s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes", explained Imperva's CTO Amichai Shulman. "The data provides a unique glimpse into the way that users select passwords and an opportunity to evaluate the true strength of passwords as a security mechanism. Never before has there been such a high volume of real-world passwords to examine."

Some key findings of the study include:

The shortness and simplicity of passwords means many users select credentials that will make them susceptible to basic forms of cyber attacks known as brute force attacks.

Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password is 123456.

Recommendations for users and administrators for choosing strong passwords.

For enterprises, password insecurity can have serious consequences. "Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like 123456," said Shulman.
"The problem has changed very little over the past 20 years," explained Shulman, referring to a 1990 Unix password study that showed a password selection pattern similar to what consumers select today. "It's time for everyone to take password security seriously; it's an important first step in data security."

Imperva will host a webinar detailing the study's findings. To register, please sign up here: https://imperva.webex.com/imperva/onstage/g.php?d=792179849&t=a&SourceID=004

ENDS

About Imperva
Imperva, the Data Security leader, enables a complete security lifecycle for business databases and the applications that use them. Over 4,500 of the world?s leading enterprises, government organizations, and managed service providers rely on Imperva to prevent sensitive data theft, protect against data breaches, secure applications, and ensure data confidentiality. The award-winning Imperva SecureSphere is the only solution that delivers full activity monitoring from the database to the accountable application user and is recognized for its overall ease of management and deployment. For more information, visit www.imperva.com.

For a basic security policy for passwords it should contain
capital letter: A
Symbol: @
Number: 1
lowercase letter: e
minimum of 8 letters
Ultimately it is up to the user to protect the information but a good security policy is the first line of defence for any bussiness and corporation.